Melbourne Users of R Network (MelbURN)

Getting in shape for the sport of data science

March 16, 2011 · 6:00 PM
Deloitte Level 10

Jeremy Howard founded FastMail.FM (sold to Opera software in 2010) and Optimal Decisions Group (sold to Choicepoint/LexisNexis in 2008). After selling FastMail, he became interested in data mining competitions, and entered some of the competitions at Kaggle, where he has had a number of good results, including:

Tourism time-series forecasting (team with Lee Baker): Winner
University grant prediction: Winner
Chess ratings: 2nd place
IJCNN social network challenge: 4th place

Jeremy liked Kaggle so much, he joined the company! He is now Kaggle's Chief Data Scientist. (Kaggle is the company running the $3m Heritage Health Prize.)

In this talk, Jeremy will provides tips on how to successfully compete, and show how he combines R with other tools to build predictive models. He will provide a walkthrough of the data, visualizations, and code, for a number of his competition entries.

The talk will also include an introduction to the theory behind Jeremy's favorite modelling algorithm: random forests. He guarantees that by the end of the talk everybody, regardless of their technical background, will understand exactly how random forests work!

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Jeromy Anglim

Screencast of talk:
PC: http://media.kaggle.com/MelbURN...
iPad/iPhone4: http://media.kaggle.com/MelbURN...

0 · March 23, 2011
Tony Ladson

This was the type of presentation where you go home and can't sleep because there are so many new things to think about

0 · March 22, 2011
Craig Rodger

Excellent. Kudos to Jeremy for being prepared to share his knowledge the way he did. I found it incredibly useful. He has kicked my butt completely in the data mining competitions on Kaggle but at the same time makes it look really simple.

0 · March 17, 2011
Emma Link

Need to state end time of 8pm at outset. Interesting content, engagingly delivered.

0 · March 17, 2011
Mai Dang

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on R randomForest and some interesting "nuts and bolts" of "Machine Learning" workbench, this indeed would help to deal more effectively with large datasets at some extent.

0 · March 17, 2011
Graham Webster

Great talk by JH.

0 · March 17, 2011
A former member

Great presentation!

0 · March 17, 2011
Jeromy Anglim

Jeremy was a very engaging presenter.
He provided some great suggestions for being a more effective data scientist.

0 · March 17, 2011
Yuval Marom

Parking is quite tricky around there cause many car parks close at 5/6pm. The best I've found is on Lonsdale st between King St and Spencer St. It's open till midnight and costs $8, and there are always spaces.

0 · March 16, 2011
Leo Lopes

Is there free parking after business hours close by? Thanks.

0 · March 16, 2011
A former member

Great news - there's now 7 spots available for this talk. If you're interested in coming tonight, be sure to RSVP as soon as possible.

(I will be recording the talk and will provide a link once it's uploaded.)

0 · March 16, 2011
A former member

Gang, since this meetup is now full, if you RSVP'd but can't come after all, please click the "can't go" button so that someone else can take your place.

0 · March 15, 2011
Jeromy Anglim

I don't think there will be a remote option, but we'll try to record it and make it available at a later date, if all goes well.

0 · March 6, 2011
Shane Butler

L10 not L11 this time

0 · March 6, 2011

45 attended

Melbourne, Australia

Founded Aug 4, 2010

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